Abundance (Part 2)

Brett Llewellyn

August 9, 2012

Big gun Brett Llewellyn is the COO at Bell Partners Accountants, Advisors and Auditors – BRW’s No1 Most Productive Firm for eight consecutive years – speaks at Soul Sessions. “Abundance,” he said “is about freedom and options and I’m interested in the how”.

Now, first guest tonight… We have Superman, Clark Kent a.k.a. Brett Llewellyn. He’s now the COO and part owner of Bell Partners Accountants, Advisers and Auditors. Which has featured in BRW’s top 100 accounting firms since 2003. And is noted as the number 1, numero uno, most productive firm for 7 consecutive years and now 8 actually. Brett told me tonight, also for 2010. So if you have your own business or if you’re a freelancer, he’s the man! So please welcome, Brett!

This is when I was born. In your case when you were born. When do you think you’ll die? Awful question. I’m gonna say 90. How much do we sleep a day? Roughly 8 hours? Some of us less, some of us more. What else do we do with our lives? How long have we got?

I have actually had someone say sex is probably about that much. Well in my case probably just a line there. The message in here really is this. This is the limitation. So this here is that limited small amount of opportunity that we have to become abundant.

As far as I’m concerned, how we get to abundance? Number one is attitude. Underneath attitude we’re interested in things like desperation. The key message for us is act like we’re a small business with 2 or 3 staff, everyday. And if you act desperate, that doesn’t mean you act recklessly but if you act desperate, then you are very likely to succeed.

Second thing that we have to be concerned about over here is innovation. We’ve become the most productive accounting firm for the last 7, now 8 years. So that’s something that we’re really proud about. You know how we’ve done it? We’ve innovated. We’ve been real. We’ve been consistent. We’ve been tough with our people and we’ve been fair.

Can I suggest to the people that aren’t necessarily running their own business, and this concept has been used before but I think it’s a really good one, you are actually running a business. You’re running a business about you.

Who’s heard of The Secret? Yeah? A lot of people have probably read the book. A lot of that was about abundance, wasn’t it? We had houses. If we put a photo up on the wall, we’ve had that house up there. In a couple of years time we’d get that house. We’d have a check. Please pay Brett Llewellyn a million dollars. And we put it on our wall. And a car or whatever else it may be. But again, the real message here is we can do those things. But sitting there crossing our fingers and just pretending that we’re gonna get there if we try hard enough is just not gonna do it for us. It’s one of the actions. One of the specific things that we are going to do to become abundant over time.